Washington Council Approves Stadium, With Conditions

By JAMES DAO

Published: December 15, 2004

The City Council narrowly approved a taxpayer-financed plan late Tuesday night to build a new riverfront baseball stadium. But it was not clear whether the amended measure would be accepted by Major League Baseball, which had planned to bring the former Montreal Expos to Washington next year.

The plan included a last-minute amendment requiring that the city find private financing to pay at least half of the stadium's construction costs, which have been estimated at $280 million. With land acquisition and improvements to roads and other services, the cost of the project is expected to rise to more than $440 million.

The amendment, presented by Linda W. Cropp, the council chairwoman, requires that the stadium not go forward if private financing cannot be found. The original plan negotiated by Mayor Anthony Williams said only that the stadium would be built almost entirely with public financing.

Advocates of Mr. Williams's plan said Ms. Cropp's amendment might kill the agreement with Major League Baseball to bring the Expos, now renamed the Nationals, to Washington for the 2005 season, which begins in four months.

Baseball officials have said they will not accept any changes to the original agreement reached with Mr. Williams in September.

''Under your amendment, there is a chance that we will not build a new stadium,'' said Councilman Jack Evans, who has led the fight for the stadium on the council. ''Major League Baseball might find that a complete violation of the agreement.''

Ms. Cropp, who early in the day had seemed prepared to accept the original plan with some relatively small changes, said she changed her mind after receiving a letter from the management of the Expos on Tuesday.

That letter, intended to ease council concerns about the high public costs of the stadium, said the team would ''have no objection'' to the city finding private financing, but offered no assurances that it would help find such financing.

''The letter was not a good faith effort,'' said Ms. Cropp, who had been in talks with baseball officials to amend the original deal. ''I've been trying for two weeks to get something tangible and that really meant something.''

Ms. Cropp said her amendment would give the city ''a heavy hand'' to open new talks with Major League Baseball to improve the stadium deal for the city.

''There is an opportunity for us to reconsider the legislation later on if in fact something came up that really meant something,'' she said.

When Ms. Cropp's measure passed, it drew cheerful whoops of support from opponents of the stadium in the council audience.

Mayor Williams, supported by business groups, has argued that the 41,000-seat stadium will anchor a development boom along the Anacostia River near Capitol Hill and bring new pride to the district, which has been without baseball since the Senators left for Texas in 1971.

But while many residents here have yearned for a return to the glory days of Walter Johnson, Harmon Killebrew and Frank Howard, public support for the stadium plan has been dampened by a perception among some that Mr. Williams had accepted a bad deal.

Though Mr. Williams and his council allies had argued that Major League Baseball would have taken the Expos to another locale, possibly northern Virginia, if the deal had been any different, critics said the mayor should have demanded much more from the league's wealthy owners.

That sentiment was expressed starkly by former Mayor Marion S. Barry Jr., who won election to the City Council last month. In an opinion piece published on Tuesday in The Washington Post, Mr. Barry asserted that multimillionaire team owners had been taking cities ''hostage,'' requiring ''taxpayers to shoulder the burden while owners skim the cream'' from sports profits.

That view was repeatedly echoed during more than 12 hours of debate on Tuesday, including by Councilman David Catania, a stadium opponent, who said, ''We are subsidizing multimillionaires to pay salaries to other multimillionaires.''

The financing in the original plan required that debt service on the construction bonds, about $26 million a year, be paid through taxes on businesses, federal agencies and consumers who buy goods and services at games. In addition, the team would be charged rent starting at $3 million and rising to $5.5 million in six years.

In addition to the high public share of the cost, critics have raised a number of other complaints, from minor things like the number of free tickets the team will donate each game to major ones like the city's liability for cost overruns.

Map of Washington D.C. highlighting the site of the planned stadium: The cost of the project is expected to be more than $440 million.